I’m dying, that much is obvious, I can’t be less than eighty years old and my organs are in a terrible state. Maybe I was a beggar bit by a dog . . . maybe some pious soul carried me to this nauseating hospital. Maybe before that I was a gentleman professor in some university, and had to lose my head after a distressing episode. A poem by Horace, for example. Maybe I was a professor at the Catholic university, an enthusiast of poetry. Maybe I was only a policeman, shot dead in a gunfight against narcos. All the possibilities make sense, I’ll chase up a few of them. Just now I was born.

*

Before waking I dreamt a pale, flabby woman said to me “only Jung Ho can love you”, and I agreed, convinced, but when I opened my eyes it made no sense. Nothing makes any sense to me. But I have to write, even at the risk of seeming ridiculous to my peers. This isn’t the moment to deny that my entire life, I’ve had intellectual aspirations. I say that, even if just so they know how much their opinions matter to me.

And there isn’t much in a spirit for whom language flows like milk, and doesn’t suffocate or poison. But first I have to prove things for myself, as I said before. I have to prove for myself that language is poison, and I wish nobody ever learnt these demon signs. Writing is something else. Writing reveals itself against a more primitive language of saliva and respiration, in essence primitive and animal. Writing is dark, and profoundly melancholy. If I choke from a lack of air when I write, it’d be natural.

*

I write like someone playing a role. Forgive me.

I don’t dream anymore, I’ve lost the keys of time. Time is viscous and slips from my hands. It leaks from my elbows. Spiritual material, whatever it is, must just be material. Now I’ve said it. I feel guilt, an immense guilt, and my guilt is not of this world in any way, yet here is where it must be purged.

*

I don’t know how to relax, my language is rigid as a suit of armor. As I write, I have to love a certain expression on your face. I’d like it to have been contempt, but it was mockery, mock whatever you like. I have to love that expression as a dying person loves each one of the claws that pierce through her flesh. I write with primary colors. With absurd colors, deliberat—

“They’re the ones you need,” you say to me.

*

You read that somewhere, I answer. A comeback that works for everything you say. I still need to teach myself, like someone who’s received a beautiful instrument as a gift and barely gets a squeak from it. I need to teach myself this, too. I have to unlearn. Unaccustom myself from language. Its shrillness. I’m going to tell you something now, as I am dying. I loved a man, a boy, and he believed he loved me. One day I found him walking along the path that leads to the cemetery. He wasn’t alone, from what I managed to see with my peripheral vision. That’s where I saw him for the first time. Then came a silence of millennia, a long season filled with blossomings, filled with those flowers blue or obsessive baby blue. Or violet. Their color gave off a quality so material it frightened me. Truth is, I don’t know what I’m saying when I say matter or material.

*

Maybe I have to set aside my armor a little. Write something a bit more freely, in a more legible way. I don’t know. At heart there’s nothing to tell and it’s dull to have to say so at every moment, awakening suspicions. Does a desperate person possess a language, or are they possessed by it? I still don’t understand why I haven’t given up. I don’t have to give up, maybe first it’s necessary to lie, slander and spin a few yarns so nobody realizes the fraud. But I do have to write. From these hands will come stories. But before that I must forget language, cover its tracks, so only the diaphanous event appears, blurred at the edges. There has to be a light . . . a pious light that envelops everything, in a fog dense with unreality and nostalgia. Nos tal gia, here’s the little word I whisper to you. And maybe written in a rush, like this, my stories really are tedious, maybe I have to unravel the phenomenon and reveal the frayed string or the wooden scaffolding inside this Trojan horse I’m building.

*

I miss you, I’m looking at the book by T.S. Eliot about poets and poetry you gave me. How sad. I won’t talk to you again because I’m a minor figure, and don’t need to interpret the role of the grand loser. I’m not going to settle for an installment of yours in time, I prefer eternity. Apologies, my lukewarm, asthmatic sweetheart, from you I’ll accept everything, everything and nothing more.

*

Maybe if you’d just called, if you’d called and told me this fledgling world has been restored, I’d run in pursuit of you, I’d take hold of your skinny, brown face with your thin mollusk lips, stretched against their will. Hiding somewhat uneven teeth. Your elusive gaze and the slim, straight line of your nose that gave away the rigidity of your spirit and your mood always quick to judge.

*

A pink dinosaur crosses from one side of my vision to the other. The quetiapine is taking even that from me.

*

I have to fill seven sheets a day as an exercise. I desire to be the best possible narrator of this world. To narrate the horror of being. Of existing. I have to read a lot, bring myself up to the level of those who feel the most noble sensations. I have to leave awkwardness behind. Or make it abandon me. And raise my voice, oh god, I don’t want to be sickly sweet. I don’t need a voice, I need a choir of voices to sing this diabolic music. I’ll do it. Eventually I will manage it. I’ll do it, I swear. I swear a thousand times, on my life. May I die if I don’t achieve it. May I die doubly aware that to die is my desire. May I die of my own death, which is to be born again, an idea I profoundly detest. Continue to write, whatever it is you write.

*

To keep writing as a kind of zero script. Emotion . . . zero degrees. Please do tell me what you came for. Enter the hotel, read “open” on a green rectangle. Adjust your vision, everything is smudged or blurry, assuming it’s owing to a defect of vision and not to someone who’s come to ruin everything.

          “You’re going to wait for me,” says X.
          Irritation makes Y’s left eyelid start to quiver.
          “You wouldn’t have come back,” says X. “You know, I was reading the letter you sent.”
          “That was a long time ago,” says Y. “The past isn’t binding.”
          Y tears up a sheet of paper.
          “I’m not going to talk about that with you,” X answers, and begins to leave the room.
          Y leaves first, pushing by X.

I bet your idea of founding a retro cineclub has to do with these platonic ideas of yours. One can’t waste time like that.

*

We’re playing. I’m playing and I’m afraid that after so much playing we aren’t in the same game anymore. I don’t remember the rules, I’m a monster. Everything has abandoned me except the persistence of voices, infinite voices in a tower of sound. In the shrillness of silence one has to pilgrimage to the site of foundations. To read your words between black covers, as if I were a madman. Though the final poem always escapes me. Ha. There it is yes. No, it’s gone again. I don’t have time. I have time. I have it I have it.

*

I must write, I must breathe, so long as I breathe I’ll write. I don’t breathe. Maybe I don’t ever write. I must. I will not. I haven’t written yet, I’ll never write.

*

Now is the moment to state plainly that something happened. Xul got off the bus and came through the door of the café.

          “And the arthe, where ithit?”
          “You all are the arthe,” he laughed, an unnecessary accomplice.

The first days he came and hurriedly took a book from the shelf, then went out to drink a coffee in the smokers’ area. Little by little he began to enter more fully and occupy the main tables. He could stay in the café for hours, the whole afternoon. He had a paranoid vision of nature. Everything was at war against everything, and one always had to be prepared since the solutions to the equations weren’t always clear at first sight. To solve them depended on a chance intersection of events, very particular but precise, unknowable but precise. Xul was from Texas, and his true name was H&G, he’d adopted the other name from the Argentine painter Xul Solar. I’ll write about him when the time comes. Never. By the way, he never made that joke about art. He made a different one I don’t remember, but in any case, it’s true he was obsessed with some zombie ants that after being injected with a virus, just wanted to climb compulsively to the top of the highest trees and jump.

*

To arrive, to depart, to get confused. To never find oneself again. Arrogance, that pale mask for shyness, will not overcome me. How can one fail to speak after having chosen not to contain oneself, how can one close oneself to language. Close it in ignorance of the unsaid. Of the said but retracted. I must retract myself every time I speak overmuch. What does it mean to speak overmuch? To open oneself up too much in the act of speaking? To speak of that which one cannot? Perhaps there is fear of misunderstanding? There will always be misunderstandings, as nothing falls straight, one-way, words love to travel and multiply in multiple senses, those swine. There is a zeal of unity within me. Why must I control all that I believe is mine? The terrible economy of my ego. Let it escape from me then. Am I one? Am I various? And equally, is each one of the various selves that I am one or various? Are we unified by guilt, nightmare?

*

Too many questions to pose to fate. I don’t want to listen. I must start to write or I will die. I will die anyway. The itinerary of my fall. I’m not fond of the anecdote. I won’t tell a thing. I must love the anecdote a little more, and the describable event. My abstractions are going to freeze me. I must love the contingency of a love that’s complete, unfurl my completeness, I must I must I must. I am a debtor. This language doesn’t belong to me, I must speak of what I see, of what I feel, of what I hear. Of what appears to me in the form of a hunch, in the form of a presence in the heart of language that does not leave. I want to scare away that dinosaur but it comes back, at times clearly defined, at times blurry, crossing my path. I must listen. Allow myself to be carried away. My body draws back and then yearns for the hardness of muscles, the embrace of another’s body. My blood boils and grows impatient. I don’t have to wait, this language is another’s body for me. I didn’t expect you to change opinion after that strange scene, I wasn’t acting a role that day for you.

*

I was scaring you and didn’t calculate, I never imagined it. We hadn’t got there, everything was premature. Everything remained to be done and it was sublime to celebrate the sounds and give a name to each palpitation. We weren’t there yet. Death, you said with a rough voice, an expression of mockery. You’ll never mock again. Don’t play, I’m blind to this world, sorrow blinded me, the fall of a few pine leaves. Time blinded me. The intervals between one second and the next, which isn’t a next but a silence, the abyssal silence of aerial saliva, blinded me. The walks along Heroínas avenue blinded me. Do you remember when you spit in the face of the policeman who took our backpacks to look for us the drug and we laughed, sprawled on the ground, piglet, I said to you, my darling little swine. Don’t go ernev, ernev, ernev. What drug turns my syllables to mirrors. Arli arli arli arli arli.

*

How to begin this fracture. Who or how is going to begin this tale. Who and how, and for what reason, doesn’t matter. The wind, the wind and a strange way of misinterpreting the world are going to begin to tell this story. Night falls, it’s snowing. A cold hand raises up from the last of the snow drifts and unfurls with the death rattle like a flesh and blood flower, of hypothermic skin.

*

At nightfall, out of that cold whiteness, the profile of a shadow emerged, with a particle in it familiar to the concrete, sand, lime and stone. Respiratory distress, they call it. Who or what has begun to tell that scene. Something invertebrate, slithering, a consumer of the dregs of night. Language is cruelty and impertinence, he says, music is compassion and we are undeserving. Language is penance and belongs to us. Is there anything to do? Is there anything to say? Damage is always fulfilled within language, every breakage, every split making the atom of a world explode, in the extraction of delirium out of words. By means of what procedures? The language shows the teeth, sharp, since once exploded, that language is never capable of signifying again. The speakers of that language have to turn to other methods, seek out other vices of communication. All the same they know it doesn’t matter, the image has been lost and it’s necessary to communicate like the devil, measuring their silences or their music. The devil’s exchange is born of pretense. The correspondence of information no longer matters, and there’s no complete answer, just deliveries that by chance, in a random way, seem to correspond. Everything is aleatory when harm is done to the womb of language. Autumn is gone but the leaves are still here, incapable of rotting, skittering over the ground following the inclinations of an amnesiac wind.

*

“I can’t, I don’t want to, I shouldn’t have spoken. I’ve dreamt of cracks in the roof, of a snake that turned you to stone so you could feel.”

“I read The Beauty of the Husband as the moon emits a distressing shine.”

“I have the feeling something is breaking, something outside me is breaking, now I don’t name myself any longer but only emit a high-pitched sound, a whinny at dawn, then I wake.”

“I dance, I dance alone, all alone, wrapped in a veil of silk, I trace ovals in the air with my hips and I laugh, I laugh, until I fall on my knees in a room I don’t recognize.”

“I smell the sweet aroma of coffee, I take a sip, I make noise on purpose, I sip the coffee loudly to annoy my neighbors, on my face there’s an expression that doesn’t suit me, I look in the mirror, I am a terrified man.”

“Release me from speech, I won’t ever write again, not in this broken language, if only I could directly transmit to you my collapse.”

“Fallacious, your language that simulates a failure to transmit all the same strikes me.”

“I need color to disintegrate this music, coming from I don’t know where . . .”

“I dream. Today it was raining as I waited for you to appear, your absence is precious to me.”

“Listen to me, time is slowness, I have to recuperate you in fragments, collect your broken limbs. With your face I make myself a coat, and with the leftover skin I feed the jackals.”

“Listen to me, I let out the little shriek of an ant and nothing matters to me, I laugh like someone drowning in a cup of fragrant tea.”

“Talk to me, bark, whinny, strike the stones until you remember how to pronounce the word enchantment. Talk to me, bark, whinny, hiccup, shut up already, oh shut up . . .”

*

I’m afraid. I’m not waiting but I represent some forms of the wait. There is a whole scenography of the wait, do you remember? My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love, but my mind holds the key. I’m afraid, I’ve lost what once linked me to the world. How many times do you have to save the same book? Rain, rain, rain. Adjectives. Verbs. Silence. Silence. Sh. Shh. Shhh.

*

To go out toward the hunt of the first word, to breathe, to attempt to breathe when the music is a long draught, bitter. Life is rhythm. Everything is rhythm, you said, as you gulped it down with strange devotion.

To trace the path over which the dusty foot glides.

To take care not to name that.

To merely take care.

Is this a Prayer Book?

Obviously not.

“Nn—no.”

*

She has returned, turning in silence around a self-imposed axis. Nothing waits for her. Love, contempt, no longer mean a thing. She has returned to gnaw the bone, so that they gnaw the bone. She has returned somehow from that place where she wasn’t needed and where nothing was needed. She has returned, making requests and demands, with her inconvenient voice, her little voice of a stinger. She’d have liked to be twenty years old again. She begs for water, she begs for a crust, she pleads for her fineries be returned to her, she pleads to see him. He can’t have evaporated like that. She wants to ask his mother some questions, the old lady comes, they’ve made her come. A young girl, from who knows where, with a head of hair like fire, is looking for her son. My son can’t see her, not out of impoliteness, but because something definitive prevents him, he cannot and will not be able to see her anymore. She implores, she needs to know. The rats take pity, the old lady is stone. For a second her shiny little eyes reveal infinite sorrow, but there is hardness and coldness in those eyes, unmoved, their gleam is severe in the moonlight. The rats take pity, they call out to her with little high-pitched voices, but they’re afraid, they’ve guessed she isn’t looking for the truth, not that truth, they call out to her, they want to dissuade her but she doesn’t hear them, she can’t hear them. She leaps up the steps that separate her from her lover’s room, she draws aside the curtains and finds his dark profile in a corner, the eyes of both flash for a second in recognition, then he makes a short guttural sound of protest, he wants darkness, needs it. The maid enters, agitated, she wants to cut off her step, as if preventing that sudden shock of light might protect them forever from that impossible moment. The pupils of the boy dilate, they readjust to the light, they’re dazzled by the ebony shine of her plumage, he shouts joyous on the verge of saying something, the words coagulate on the tip of his tongue, he gives a hoarse arrogant caw and tilts his head, then he closes himself off again and looks at the sky, the wide blue horizon out the window, and says nothing.